


Free To Be You and Me

by crowleyshouseplant (orphan_account)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-31
Updated: 2011-10-31
Packaged: 2017-10-25 14:15:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/271203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/crowleyshouseplant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cas, we've talked about this. Personal space? [my beloved is like a roe or a young hart]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Free To Be You and Me

Dean feels Castiel before he hears the wings—(Dean told Sam once, Sounds like a goddamn pidgeon flapping off and Sam had just looked at him, lips pinched tight over his teeth and said, I was thinking more like doves). Feels the air popping backwards, a thunderclap against the mountain ridge of his spine.

Cas always lands too close, like freak lightening, like lamps sparking on dust-wrapped ceilings, warning  _danger danger danger_ , red alerts clanging in his head as he whips around, breath already scudding against the soft tunnel of his throat before shipwrecking against his palate, goddamn it, letting Castiel—assuming it was the angel and not some other celestial douchebag—hear it, and he wonders if Castiel can feel the gasp like hot air steaming on a humid day down in the deep south.

It’s in the first few seconds that, as he’s registering how the trench coat brushes at his knees, that Dean notices Cas’s eyes. The way they widen. The way they somehow manage to find each unravelling carpet fiber, the blotchy stain on the ceiling (and he probably already knows what caused the stain and it’s just some dumb stain to Dean, just part of the regular low-life motel décor), the chipped mirror, the scabbed over place on his jaw where Dean nicked himself shaving—Cas’s eyes find it all (and probably more besides) without moving, without swiveling around in their sockets like normal human eyes, without the pupils dilating, reacting to the changing light—just fixed and unblinking and staring, like they’re drinking from a river that Dean can’t see—or that he is the river—and maybe he is because Dean’s heart chills and freezes like that one time he broke ice up in Minnesota and Sam had to haul his ass out, lips blue, teeth chattering a tambourine rhythm against his jaw.

For a brief moment that stretches Dean into a distorted reflection, they stare at each other like that time Dean came on a doe in a California wood while searching for the body of a man whose ghost was haunting a nearby tourist lodge, and they had just stared at each other—she still, waiting, even as her muscles tensed for flight, rippling like pond water under a sighing summer sky.

When he blinked, when he opened his eyes, she was gone.

Cas’s hands hang stiffly by his sides, like he doesn’t know what to do with them, and Dean just wishes he’d jam them in his pockets or something, so that they don’t look so still, so that his skin doesn’t look like it’s turned to stone.

He’s never seen anybody with such steady hands, not even whispering together, pleading for something to hold, to touch. The skin hugs the knuckles, like he’s too skinny, too thin, and Dean remembers how Jimmy hadn’t even eaten for days, for months, and Dean wonders what’ll happen if Jimmy just wastes away if Cas refuses to put meat on his bones—if his skin’ll just turn translucent and the only thing Dean’ll see is Castiel, ship in a bottle, before his eyes burn out of his skull.

Dean opens his mouth and almost chokes on the words when he sees Cas’s eyes shift downwards towards him, his head tilting, his own lips parting, reflecting the movement back at him. “You’ve gotta back up, Cas.”


End file.
